New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Is Gmail's unsubscribe feature safe?

Ask HN: Is Gmail's unsubscribe feature safe?
3 by usbsea | 0 comments on Hacker News.
Got a spam email today. It had an unsubscribe link pointing to a random Azure blob. I click "Mark as Spam" and it offers me to unsubscribe instead? This was worring as I thought ... well the unsubscribe is a dangerous link so how will it do it. Turns out it uses a header like X-Unsubscribe-Web. I checked what that was set to, and in this spam it was a well known online newspaper plus a bogus query string. So they probably put a plausible link (i.e. not a black list) to fool Google. But in general X-Unsubscribe-Web could be set to something malicious, right? And why is Google even discouraging me from reporting spam (or in this case... phishing). Edit: I see there is now a report Phishing and that button treats me like an adult :-)

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